Israel has the right to sever ties with UNRWA

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SDEROT, Israel – On Monday, Israel’s parliament overwhelmingly passed two laws affecting UNRWA, the acronym for the euphemistically named United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which promotes itself as a humanitarian organization dedicated to the well-being of Palestinian refugees .

Decades ago, when it was founded, that may have been even more true. Today, UNRWA is a farce controlled by Hamas and other interest groups, who openly advocate the destruction of Israel.

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This has been well established for a long time. UNRWA’s mandates include, for example, the operation of schools for Palestinian refugees.

At every stage of their education, Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews and Israel, which is presented as an illegitimate state that has stolen the land of their ancestors. They learn that killing Jews is the highest calling and brings honor to their families and nation. The curricula used by UNRWA – and paid for by Western countries, with Canada among the most generous benefactors – promote extreme violence and blind hatred.

Anyone who suggests that such issues have been addressed and that UNRWA schools only teach reading, writing and arithmetic is either blatantly uninformed or deliberately lying.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel fought for its survival on three fronts, its rapid victory was unexpected.

The small and poor country did not have the financial or other resources to meet the needs of the large Palestinian population, which suddenly lived under Israeli control.

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Einat Wilf, a former member of Knesset from the left-wing Labor Party, is an expert on UNRWA and has written the groundbreaking book on the organization’s origins and development. She remembers the chaos immediately after the Six-Day War.

On June 14, 1967, four days after the end of the war, one took place exchange of letters between the Commissioner General of UNRWA and a senior foreign policy advisor to the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, in which they agreed on a non-binding and voluntary basis that UNRWA would continue to serve the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Territories. West Bank.

“Many people have the wrong impression that Israel should cooperate with UNRWA,” Wilf told the National Post in an interview on Tuesday. “As if this were a treaty obligation, but it is not.” The agreement was concluded in good faith, with the understanding that UNRWA would fulfill its humanitarian obligations. It could also be canceled at any time with one week’s notice.

“Despite the continued appeal and power of the letters UN,” Wilf explained, UNRWA “is actually a Palestinian organization. So the people who work in Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinians. They can still do their job. They can teach the children the next day that Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”

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This slogan is a staple of the hate taught in UNRWA schools. It openly calls for Israel’s destruction, just like Hamas.

Since October 7, Israel has uncovered evidence that many of UNRWA’s schools and healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip also serve as Hamas bases, or are connected to the tunnel network used exclusively for military and terrorist purposes.

UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini has claimed as much he was not aware of it that the organization’s headquarters in Gaza City sat atop a huge Hamas server farm that fed off its power supply. Lazzarini’s claim is untenable. And that’s just one of many examples.

Support among thousands of UNRWA workers for the October 7 attack and subsequent brutality is glorified in online groups and chat rooms.

Even Lazzarini has publicly admitted that UNRWA workers may have participated in the October 7 atrocities. We also know that doctors and UNRWA teachers were among the Palestinians who held Israeli hostages trapped in their homes.

But in recent days, both Canada’s Minister of International Development, Ahmed Hussenand its Ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Raehave condemned Israel’s position in refusing to cooperate with UNRWA – a UN agency effectively controlled by Hamas and other terrorist interests committed to its destruction.

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Their posts on X state that Israel’s refusal to cooperate with UNRWA threatens an already dire situation in the Gaza Strip.

I challenge Ambassador Rae to focus his criticism on Hamas (and its benefactors, Qatar and Iran), which is known to seize aid shipments entering the Gaza Strip.

Ambassador Rae should be apoplectic about UNRWA’s brazen corruption and brutality. He could also challenge Egypt for refusing to allow aid from its territory to the Gaza Strip. But Rae is silent about that.

Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip could end tomorrow. The bloodshed of the past year could have easily been prevented.

Ambassador Rae should urge Hamas to lay down its arms and immediately release the hostages – dead and alive. If he chose to use his influence in that way, from a humanitarian perspective, there would be a much quicker and more positive outcome to the endless suffering.

Punishing Israel for cutting ties with UNRWA is a grotesque moral reversal.

National Post

Vivian Bercovici is a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and the founder of the State of Tel Aviv.

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